Faceți căutări pe acest blog

SYSTEMIC ERRORS, GOOD MANAGEMENT AND SENTIMENT ANALYSIS-1

Systemic errors are considered as” Error
that affects all items comprising a group (such as a production batch) in a
similar manner and to a similar magnitude. Systemic errors are caused by a flaw
in the system (such as in the calibration of a measuring device), occur in the
same direction and, therefore, do not cancel each other out. Also called
constant error or systematic error.[1]”

On the other hand, systemic errors are
leading towards systemic risk that is defined as” 1. General: Probability of
loss or failure common to all members of a class or group or to an entire
system. Erroneously also called systematic risk.

2. Investing and trading: Probability of
loss common to all businesses and investment opportunities, and inherent in all
dealings in a market. Also called market risk, it cannot be circumvented or
eliminated by portfolio diversification but may be reduced by hedging. In stock
markets, systemic risk is measured by beta-coefficient.”[2]

There should be made a difference between
systemic and systematic.

Wikipedia is defining systematic errors as”
... biases in measurement which lead to the situation where the mean of many
separate measurements differs significantly from the actual value of the
measured attribute. All measurements are prone to systematic errors, often of
several different types. Sources of systematic error may be imperfect
calibration of measurement instruments (zero error); changes in the environment
which interfere with the measurement process and sometimes imperfect methods of
observation can be either zero error or percentage error. ”[3].

The action of systemic errors upon safety
into an enterprise or a community or a larger social structure could be
significant. Some common examples are regarding the reporting system- when in
order to report an unexpected event (that could turn on into a nasty incident
or even an accident) the organisational procedures are implying the follow up
of a long chain till the problem is solves somehow or there are taken emergency
measures. There is nothing wrong with a reporting procedure”per se”. The
problem resides when this procedure is not taking into account the context of
activity and is supposed to be implemented as it is, regardless of the specific
conditions.

Another example of systemic error- on a
larger scale- is the provision (adopted for example by the Romanian law) that
work accidents should be declared only those with more than three days of hospitalizing
or absence from the work. Other countries- like UK- under the RIDDOR reporting
criteria [4]
are reporting more than 10.000 injuries- Romania is reporting currently just no
more than 6500 accidents/year.

As the systemic error is imposed- generally
by the functioning management system- it is systematically omitted when
auditing a system following the existing management rules.

As an example- we could consider the one
from figure 1- where we have a management that is not very familiar with
documenting (in writing) its procedures. So, there could be serious incidents
and even accidents because the employees have no written safety procedures
(other than the ones required by law), the machines and tools have no written
maintenance procedures, there are no best practice procedures for doing a
specific activity and finally- the products that are going to the client are
poorly documented.

Figure 1 Example of systemic error
propagation

The example (real) is not necessarily
derived from malevolence- in the first moment the management was focused on
reducing the paperwork, the employees were overqualified and do not need a lot
of instructions and the tools and machines were new and the maintenance was
assured by the supplier. As the business was developing and more complex
products were added to the fabrication line there was a real problem with the
absence of written documentation but at the employee level everyone was used
with the empiric work procedures and nobody felled the need to write them down.
When there were hired a lot of young and inexperienced workers in order to
cover all the customers’ demands the system begun to function with problems and
there were some unexpected events- resulting in material loss- because the new
workers were pushed to the final assembly line without the documentation
regarding the work procedures and also without the one regarding the usage of
specific machines. As they were supervised by more experienced workers there
was no problem- for a time- regarding their direct safety. From the top
management till the last employee everybody was convinced that their approach
was the best. Unfortunately an occupational accident occurred- having as the
root cause the absence of written documentation regarding a complex work
procedure-in which the forearm of a worker was perforated by a drill. The
victim was very close of losing his forearm- as the emergency kit also has no
written instructions regarding how to stop the bleeding using the components
inside.

So- how to identify and prevent systemic errors?
In this respect- a way would be to appeal to those that could be affected by
these errors- in our example the employees and probably the customers.

Figure 2 is showing such a mechanism.

Figure 2 Systemic errors vs. sentiment
analysis

Man is an animal of habit. Comfort-
including comfort at work- is a continuous desire. Opinions regarding his state
at work, his comfort and others are central to almost all human activities and
are key influencers of our behaviours. Our beliefs and perceptions of reality,
and the choices we make, are, to a considerable degree, conditioned upon how
others see and evaluate the world. For this

Opinions and its related concepts such as
sentiments, evaluations, attitudes, and emotions are the subjects of study of
sentiment analysis and opinion mining. ” Sentiment analysis, also called
opinion mining, is the field of study that analyses people’s opinions,
sentiments, evaluations, appraisals, attitudes, and emotions towards entities
such as products, services, organizations, individuals, issues, events, topics,
and their attributes. It represents a large problem space. There are also many
names and slightly different tasks, e.g., sentiment analysis, opinion mining,
opinion extraction, sentiment mining, subjectivity analysis, affect analysis,
emotion analysis, review mining, etc. However, they are now all under the
umbrella of sentiment analysis or opinion mining.”[5]

Why would such an instrument be interesting
for the assurance of safety and health?

1. Because it allows the processing of
natural language. As told before the most occupational accidents have a primary
cause the human factor. We could not quantify (at this moment) the human factor-
but we could describe- in natural language- certain facts that are describing typical
behaviours and we could identify- through this description- specific patterns
that could turn into dangerous or even malevolent behaviour.

2. We could define in this analysis certain
domains of interest and formulate specific queries that could search for
peculiar aspects of behaviour that could look normal (like the work without
printed work and safety procedures) for a specific workplace but could be
decelated as peculiar in a certain mass of employees.

3. We could refine our analysis using referential
for safety- defined also in natural language.

4. We could make our search- and analysis-
for large numbers of employees. Maybe sentiment analysis would not be suitable
(at actual costs) for 3 persons- but for an enterprise with 200 or more
employees it could be interesting.

5. The opinions are anonimized- and the
employees that are giving these opinions are protected expressing their opinion
against unwanted consequences.

6. Employees are listened. The whole
managerial process could be improved by taking into consideration the employee
opinion- expressed in a certain time. A regular report- for example a
semestrial one- could be asked so that the employee is expressing its opinions
without consuming the management time- but they are actually heard and their
opinions are valued.

Comentarii

Postări populare de pe acest blog

Acknowledgements:
The author wants to thank XpertRule Software LTD and mr. Tim Sell for being
able to try Decision Author- the main software in which this prototype shall be
built.
GENERAL ASPECTS
Safety domain of research is by excellence a domain based on
expertise. Textbooks and theoretical knowledge are good but the safety expert
which inspects three times a day a certain part of an enterprise is the
ultimate safety dealer here.
A lot of expertise is transformed into lessons learned- that
are used for training and improvement of existing safety attitudes. On the
other part, this expertise could be also valued in order to build optimal and
effective safety assessment systems.
An expert system is software that emulates the
decision-making ability of a human expert. In our case- the expert part should interrogate
the specific employees regarding safety aspects of an enterprise.
The next figure illustrates how a safety expert, with the
necessary knowledge into the problem could impr…

KPI definitionA key performance indicator(KPI) is a measure of performance,
commonly used to help an organization defineand evaluate how successful it is,
typically in terms of making progress towards its long-term organizational goals. –KPIs provide business-level context to
security-generated data –KPIs answer the “so what?” question –Each additional KPI indicates a step
forward in program maturity –None of these KPIs draw strictly from security data COBITControl Objectives
for Information and Related Technology (COBIT) is a
framework created by ISACA for information technology (IT) management and IT
governance. It is a supporting toolset that allows managers to bridge the gap
between control requirements, technical issues and business risks. COBIT was first released in 1996; the current version, COBIT 5, was
published in 2012. Its mission is “to research, develop, publish and promote an
authoritative, up-to-date, international set of generally accepted information
technology control obj…